It’s November 7, the end of the first week of National Novel Writing Month. If I were a good girl, I should have 11,667 words clocked in by today, to reach the 50,000 mark by the end of the month. Instead, I have 6,518.

Numbers, numbers. What do numbers mean, anyway? To an outsider my number looks like it belongs to an irresponsible writer who is not taking this novel-writing effort seriously. If you wanted to speak numbers, the global scoreboard shows I am just above my country’s average word count, though most other countries are averaging between 6 to 9,000 words.

But numbers don’t tell the whole story, either. (Anyone who has read The Little Prince can tell you that!) And my story is: Half of the week I was in the hospital, and the rest of the week I was juggling my full-time job at Boomzap and Casual Review, driving for the family, getting a root canal, and going on a road trip to watch one of my favorite foreign bands do their first gig in Manila. It was one of those ridiculously big weeks, and because of it my novel had to take a backseat. And while other people can do all that and still stay up at night writing dutifully, I’d get home and fall fast asleep

No more big weeks, Luna - you need to write. Lucky for us NaNoWriters, we received two great pep talks for our first week (from authors Jonathan Stroud and Philip Pullman); I will follow their advice and keep writing even when things look bleak. So next week, I will just make up for this week! And as for my story, here is what I have so far: My main character, Rue, crashed her car off a sky highway onto the mysterious and seemingly unpopulated surface of the GraviNet. Did I mention I’m making interactive fiction, and that it’s cyberpunk? Ambitious, much?

Moving on to Week Two - fight, fight!

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